Microsoft apologizes to Corel, users for Office 2003 SP3 muck-up
Better late than
never.
Microsoft Corp. apologized to a software rival
for saying its file format posed a security risk and issued new tools to let
users of Office 2003 SP3 unblock a host of barred file
types.
In a posting to his own blog, David LeBlanc, a senior software development engineer with the Microsoft Office team, admitted the company’s mistake in blaming insecure file formats, including the one used by CorelDraw.
“We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct,” LeBlanc said, referring to a description in a now-changed support document. “A file format isn’t insecure — it’s the code that reads the format that’s more or less secure. The parsers we use for these older formats aren’t as robust as the code we’ve written more recently, which is part of our decision to disable them by default…
LeBlanc also echoed the mea culpa made by Reed Shaffner, product manager for Office, who acknowledged that Microsoft had done a poor job communicating the changes to users, and had failed customers when it posted daunting work-arounds that required manual editing of the Windows registry…
The revised support document lists four downloads that users can run to unblock Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel files. Other downloads are available that reverse the file blocking…
Uh, how long have these guys been around? And how many programmers on the payroll?
Playing pantywaist catch-up doesn’t exactly impress.
In a posting to his own blog, David LeBlanc, a senior software development engineer with the Microsoft Office team, admitted the company’s mistake in blaming insecure file formats, including the one used by CorelDraw.
“We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct,” LeBlanc said, referring to a description in a now-changed support document. “A file format isn’t insecure — it’s the code that reads the format that’s more or less secure. The parsers we use for these older formats aren’t as robust as the code we’ve written more recently, which is part of our decision to disable them by default…
LeBlanc also echoed the mea culpa made by Reed Shaffner, product manager for Office, who acknowledged that Microsoft had done a poor job communicating the changes to users, and had failed customers when it posted daunting work-arounds that required manual editing of the Windows registry…
The revised support document lists four downloads that users can run to unblock Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Corel files. Other downloads are available that reverse the file blocking…
Uh, how long have these guys been around? And how many programmers on the payroll?
Playing pantywaist catch-up doesn’t exactly impress.
Posted: Sun - January 6, 2008 at 07:02 AM